Plataform: Game Cube
Developer: Retro Studios
Publisher: Nintendo
Year: 2004
Players: 1-4
Rated: T
This is the sequel of the world-class game Metroid Prime, a game which brought back the Metroid series and transformed its gameplay. Follwing Prime’s tradition, Echoes introduced some cool changes and a multiplayer mode.
Gameplay
Gameplay and controls are inherited from Metroid Prime. For example the switch between beams and visors or the morph ball transformation works the same way as before. So it’s quite easy to learn to play if we know Prime already. Nevertheless there’s still some good innovation and changes in the game mechanics.
First of all, the beams have limited ammo, so it’s necesary to recharge them because if ammo reaches zero, then the only possible way for fire dark/light/annihilator beam is to use the charge. This means there isn’t infinite ammo, as in Prime.
Then there’s another challenge: Dark Aether’s atmosphere is toxic and Samus is vulnerable to it most of the time. The only way to fully avoid this is to get the Light Suit or using light fields.
Finally the puzzles are way harder because many of them are about switching between two planets: Aether and Dark Aether, so this implies we need to analyze a lot to solve them.
Samus needs to deal with a lot of challenging bosses and sub-bosses who deliver weapons or abilities when they’re defeated.
Samus’ new arsenal includes the Seeker Missile which allows her to fire 5 missiles at once. The new beams are: Light, Dark and Annihilator. The Dark Beam is slow but can paralyze an enemy if hit by a charge shot, so this works similar to the Ice Beam (Prime). The Light Beam is fast and accurate, and it leaves a burning effect on the enemy so it’s similar to the Plasma Beam. Finally, the Annihilator Bean combines ammo from both beams to shoot a powerful, fast, and accurate attack. There exist charge combos for all beams, but they need to be retrieved first and they consume a lot of missiles.
The Screw Attack returns here and it provides both lethal-quick attacks and a lot of movility to help reach distant places.
Samus can also equip new visors: Dark and Echo. The Dark Visor allows to detect invisible objects and enemies, and the Echo Visor is mostly used to solve puzzles about wave sounds.
Music
Metroid’s music is always good and Echoes isn’t the exception. Well, maybe there is the boring sounds of the Temple Grounds area but overall the OST is really cool. For example, the music in Dark Aether brings an immersive effect to the shadowy, cloudy planet. This is also the case for Sactuary Fortress, where the futuristic and digital landscape is matched perflectly with the music.
Story
The plot occurs immediatly after the events of Metroid Prime. The evil Metroid Prime survived all Samus’ attacks, and it even absorbed her DNA to transform in her nemesis: Dark Samus.
The Galactic Federation sent Samus Aran to search for a missing squad, and the only clue is that they landed in Aether. Samus will find out what happened to them and also learn about Aether’s history and its inhabitants. Apparently the natives called Luminoth are already extinct, in a similar manner to Tallon IV’s Chozos.
In the past, an asteroid hit Aether and it created a twin planet: the Dark Aether. This brought a tragedy because a new race emerged: the ING, who attacked Aether to steal its energy and deliver it to Dark Aether.
So, Samus must face the ING, Dark Samus and her long-time enemies: The Space Pirates, who were chasing the missing GF squad. Then, Samus’ mission is to recover the energy from Dark Aether to achieve peace and help the Luminoth.
The narrative style is better than before because it uses some dialogues instead of just a collection of entries in the LogBook.
Graphics.
The visual quality is similar to Prime’s without going too further. Nevertheless at that time it looked pretty good, specially in all Dark Aether’s details. This planet is like a never ending night which uses a cloudy environment with purple and red skies, full of shadowy areas, toxic lakes, etc. All of this looks great and convincing. The same can be said about other areas like Sanctuary Fortress’ futuristic style.
Multiplayer
This is easilty the most criticized element of the game. The stages have a poor design and there’s just 4 of them in total. They’re not even based on the Single Player areas. Why not create 10 maps instead, some of them located Dark Aether? This would have been a success. Besides, there’s no online multiplayer, we are talking about a GCN game. So there’s just local 4-player matches with 4 maps. The only possitive feature is that the equipment is a bit extended with more weapons like Hacker Mode, lethal Morph Ball or automatic Super-missiles.
Conlusion
I believe this is the best Metroid Prime, but I know this is an unpopular opinion.
Well, at least we can say objectively that this is the hardest one and I already gave the reasons.
The graphics and OST are good.
The plot is better and more interesting than Prime’s.
The gameplay added some cool new features.
The multiplayer just sucks but it was the first time in the series to have it.
Dark Aether is just Aether’s shadow and I feel the same about Prime 2 compared to Prime or Prime 3. It is underrated for the wrong reasons.
Grade: 9.5
Consoles Universe 